Paul Haine | Tales from the city
Music & stage
-
R.I.P. John Peel
Veteran BBC broadcaster John Peel has died at the age of 65, while on holiday in Peru. He was on a working holiday in the city of Cuzco with his wife Sheila when he suffered a heart attack. Radio 1 controller Andy Parfitt said Peel’s contribution to modern music and culture was “immeasurable”, and he was right.
4 comments -
William Shatner
William Shatner has recorded a cover version of Pulp’s ‘Common People’. It’s on a new album entitled “Has Been”, and features collaborations with Aimee Mann, Lemon Jelly, Ben Folds Five, and Henry Rollins.
And, for your pleasure: William Shatner — Common People. In case you’re wondering, that’s not Shatner doing the actual singing – it’s Joe Jackson.
2 comments -
Reading Festival 2004
If you’re going to experience a music festival to the full, you have to do things properly. The camping, the mud, the rain, the complete absence of a good night’s sleep, warmth, showers, usable toilets — in fact, any sort of basic hygiene — and good, hot food, are all essential parts of the festival experience. If you don’t spend three days covered in mud and with suspected hepititis at the end of it all, well, you’ve just not done things properly.
This is why I spent the Reading festival staying in a beautiful countryside farmhouse, sleeping every night in the world’s most comfortable bed, with a fresh, full-English breakfast every morning, a hot shower and a clean set of clothes and teeth. A short car drive to get into Reading and then a relaxing boat trip along the river Thames to get to the festival. How stupid do you think I am?
16 comments -
The Polyphonic Spree
There is no reason I can think of as to why I should like this music. We have approximately 20 men and women from Texas, who wear robes, and sing really disgustingly happy songs. Now, I’m very cynical as you know, and if somone had told me that I would be happily enjoying the music of some optimistic, cheery, robed Texan collective, well, I’d not only have laughed in their face, I’d have stolen their wallet and slept with their wife as well, just to really drive the point home.
2 comments -
The Ordinary Boys
There is a track on this album that I can’t quite tell if it’s meant to be ironic or not. In The List Goes On, The Ordinary Boys lament that “Originality is so passé”, and that they’ve heard it all done before, a hundred years ago. The whole song is a criticism of rehashing forgotten genres just for the money.
15 comments -
Wet Wet Wet
As reported by the BBC, Wet Wet Wet are getting back together. I suppose with the return of Morissey and the Pixies, it was inevitable that the dross would hop on the bandwagon at some point.
12 comments -
My First iTunes
Not being one to shy away from new technologies that are less functional and convienient than what they attempt to replace, I bought my first track from the Apple iTunes music store the other day. The track in question was the Pixies ‘Bam Thwok’, a new release by the band which is alleged to be a download-only release. In the name of experimentation, I decided that I was ok with spending the 79 English pennies required.
6 comments -
The Streets, Revisited
After the shock that was A Grand Don’t Come For Free, I mentally added The Streets’ first album, ‘Original Pirate Material’ to my ‘should buy that at some point’ list of CDs.
It’s in good company, I think, alongside such delights as Pulp’s ‘Different Class’, and Interpol’s ‘Turn On The Bright Lights’. We all have lists like this, I’m sure – albums we always mean to listen to, films we always mean to see, books we always mean to read, celebrities we always mean to seduce – we just never quite get around to it.
-
Miss Kittin
This is a difficult one for me to comment on, what with my musical taste generally revolving around arse-ugly Indie bands and 60s wannabees — what can I possibly say about European electronica?
2 comments -
iTunes
Apple launched the iTunes Music Store today, which is nice. Songs cost 79 pence (or €0.99), and albums cost £7.99 (€9.99), and can be played on the iPod, on your PC, or burnt to a CD. You could, of course, just buy the CD from somewhere like cd-wow for about the same price, and then you have a CD that you can rip or play on any PC/stereo that you like, share with your friends in the colonies, and generally be free of corporate tendrils. But enough of such grumpy luddism; without such technological advancements, we’d probably all still be listening to tapes.
So far, euroTunes has a paltry 700,000 songs available, and browsing the store (you’ll need to download iTunes for that) shows quite a few placeholder pages, with no tracks available to buy, and generally the place feels as if it’s a store that’s closing down instead of starting up. They have competition from Napster, Coca-Cola, OD2, Sony, and wippit.com, which is rare in that it offers happy mp3s for download instead of nasty DRMed Windows Media Audio files.
3 comments -
The Who
I’ve always been in two minds about ‘Greatest Hits’ compilations. On the one hand, you have all of the artist’s most popular hits – ones that you might even know more than the chorus too – in one handy collection. It’s the artist at their best. No padding, no filler. No b-sides or remixes. Simply their greatest hits. An precursor, perhaps, to launching a fully-fledged collection of their back catalogue. All well and good.
2 comments -
R.I.P. Ray Charles
Ray Charles has died of acute liver disease, which was diagnosed after he had hip replacement surgery in December. He was 73.
3 comments -
Pixies
So, I went to see the Pixies on Wednesday. They were pretty good. I wasn’t an enormous fan, had heard their music, liked some of it, nothing particularly life-changing, but the hype surrounding their return was enough to make me want to be a part of it, because then I can tell people I saw the Pixies live, and they can envy me. And they do.
1 comment -
The Streets
My first experience of The Streets was on a chat show, where they performed ‘Fit And You Know It‘ from their latest album. I thought it was awful. Just a bunch of chavs who couldn’t sing. What were people thinking? They’d been on the cover of NME, and gotten Single of The Week. I didn’t get it.
-
The Zutons
The Zutons formed early in 2002, but it’s only in the last few months that they’ve really begun to make a name for themselves and escaped from comparisons to The Coral. Taking their cues from the likes of James Brown and Dr John, lead singer and guitarist David McCabe says that "We got into this whole soul-funk-voodoo vibe." Think New Orleans, zombies, and scousers.
See thezutons.co.uk for further info.
3 comments -
Oxfam
Oxfam have announced that they will be launching their own music download service on Wednesday the 26th of May, at bignoise.com (though that site appears to be ‘for sale’ at the moment…), with 10 pence from each song going to charity. The cost of each track is slightly less than typical, ranging from 75 pence to 99 pence, and they’ll be available across Europe. Supporters of Oxfam such as Coldplay will release exclusive tracks through the service.
-
Napster
Napster relaunched yesterday in the UK, in it’s new form as a legal music download service, in much the same vein as the Coca-Cola, HMV, and Virgin services – around 99 pence for a song, you have the previews and so on, you’re allowed to burn some songs to a CD. And that’s nice.
7 comments -
Nic Armstrong
If Bob Dylan and John Lennon had a child, though a freakish and unlikely event, the result would almost certainly be Nic Armstrong.
11 comments